On a shelf is a Styrofoam cup shrunk to thumbsize, the result of extreme underwater pressure and a gift from a professor in marine sciences.

Siegel does not look like a mapmaker, with his bushy mustache, blue flannel shirt, jeans and running shoes. But then again, what is a mapmaker supposed to look like? A serious, studious sort, peering through his eyeshade at a jumble of brittle, parchment-like maps?

Delete that image from your mind; Siegel, like most digital-age cartographers, draws his maps on a computer, using Adobe Illustrator software that mimics all of the old-time instruments of the trade: pen, pencil, brush, eraser and more.

"I miss the smell of the ink, the smell of chemicals, watching an image appear,’’ Siegel says. "I miss the tactile experience, the hands-on and the working with the tools.’’

A smile crosses his elfin face; he could pass for a character in "The Hobbit."

"But it was hard correcting mistakes," he adds. "I don’t miss that."

Siegel is staff cartographer in the geography department at Rutgers University. When he is not teaching his undergraduate course in cartography, he is making maps — mostly for books written by Rutgers professors. The titles — "Art of the Court of Bijapur" and "From Mukogodo to Maasai," among others — may not sound sexy, but the maps are necessary to explain and enhance the printed material.

"It never feels repetitious," Siegel, 52, says of the maps he makes for some two dozen books a year. "Each project has different criteria. Do I have more space or less space? Can I work in black and white, or color?"

One professor jokingly suggested a scratch-and-sniff map of New Jersey to display the state’s myriad odors. Siegel says he would love to do that map some day.

In his latest project, the mapmaker’s talents are on full display. The North Brunswick resident did all of the thematic maps for the visually stunning "Mapping New Jersey" (Rutgers University Press, $39.95), the first interpretive atlas of the state in more than a century.

The maps in the coffee-table book are not your usual historical maps showing uncharted territories and sea monsters; thematic maps take a subject and give it visual meaning and poetry.

The maps he creates are "functional," not "fine art," according to Siegel. "I’m not trying to evoke emotions in the reader. My job is to bring about an understanding through pictures."

Siegel’s creations for "Mapping New Jersey" show everything from state wetlands, forests, farmland and major rivers to railroads in 1860, Cold War missile sites, median home values and the number of languages (186) spoken in New Jersey schools.

"I get to learn all these new things," the cartographer says, smiling.

EXPLAINING THE WORLD

If you’re expecting to hear how the future mapmaker spent his childhood spinning globes or reading National Geographic from cover to cover, you will be disappointed. He does remember a friend playing a globe-spinning game; the friend would tell a story based on the place the globe stopped.

Siegel was born in Buffalo; his family moved to New Jersey in 1967. His dad, Morris, was a professor in the School of Social Work at Rutgers; his mom, Yetta, was a schoolteacher in Highland Park. For years, his dad worked at summer camps, so family vacations would be taken in the winter, which meant road trips to Florida and Mexico.

"We didn’t make hotel reservations," Siegel recalls. "My dad would walk up to people and ask them where to stay, or what to see."

Siegel said he was "introverted" and "on the quiet side" as a kid. "I still feel that way," he says. Asked if he was a troublemaker or choirboy as a child, he replies slyly, "I wouldn’t use the term choirboy, not in the sense of getting into trouble, but in the sense of not being in the choir."

Later, he would enroll at Rutgers, where he majored in geography. What attracted him to the subject was not so much exotic places, but the ability of his teachers to explain the known world.

"The one thing that hooked me about geography were these professors who were explaining why things are, why cities are where they are, why the world is what it is," Siegel says.

He attended the graduate program at the university’s School of Communication Information and Library Studies, and apprenticed in the cartography lab. When the professor who had been teaching cartography at Rutgers left, Siegel took his job. One of the first things he did was grow a mustache. "I didn’t want people to confuse me for a student," he says sheepishly.

Twenty years ago, when Siegel started teaching, the cartography lab was filled with drafting tables. Today, it is filled with computer monitors. Students still draw maps and charts — on their terminals.

"It’s a mission for me to pass on to the next generation of mapmakers the human component — make sure they understand the data and not just choose from options the computer gives you," Siegel says.

He no longer requires a textbook; he couldn’t justify the cost ($125) for students. He has found that not using a book liberates him from teaching a subject chapter by chapter. "It feels like a long conversation I’ve had with students over 15 weeks," he says of a typical semester.

"I’m not trying to evoke emotions in the reader. My job is to bring about an understanding through pictures.’’-- Mike Siegel

Another mission is trying to turn the general public on to maps. "The world," he says, "seems to be divided between people who like maps and those who don’t." Siegel has scanned and uploaded dozens of historical maps from Rutgers’ special collections on his website (mapmaker.rutgers.edu). A stickler for accurate maps, he reviews maps for the online Journal of Maps (journalofmaps.com).

He is married to Debbie Henry, a Middlesex County master gardener and Girl Scout troop leader. Their 12-year-old daughter, Katie, colored several maps in "Mapping New Jersey."

It comes as no surprise that the mapmaker does not have a GPS in his car. He uses regular road maps "for navigating on larger roads" and Google maps for "smaller roads around my destination."

Maps, according to Siegel, "also give me a chance to explore an area beyond what can be seen from the road. And having an appreciation of a place because you’re paying attention to where you are.

"On the other hand,’’ he says, laughing, "I hate being lost."

Mitsu Yasukawa/The Star-LedgerMike Siegel, staff cartographer at Rutgers University, has worked on a variety of projects and maps over the years; his crowning work is "Mapping New Jersey'' (Rutgers University Press), the first interpretive atlas of New Jersey in 100 years. Here, Mike Siegel selects maps at Alexander Library in Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

ALL ABOUT JERSEY

Mapmaking, at least the thematic mapmaking Siegel does, is not glamorous work. Much of it involves finding data, and making that data meaningful and visually attractive. One map in "Mapping New Jersey" displays how many New Jerseys can fit into Alaska. (The answer is 77.) The map started with Maxine Laurie, the book’s co-editor, coming across a textbook map showing the comparative sizes of Texas, Rhode Island and New Jersey. When that map was drawn, Texas was the largest state — Alaska had not become one.

For "Mapping New Jersey," Siegel substituted Alaska for Texas, added California (the most populous state), plus New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii and Rhode Island (the five smallest states). The result, he saw, was too busy. He dropped the other states and put miniature nested versions of New Jersey over a map of Alaska. The result? "It would have made a good bedspread pattern," Siegel cracks. He then used drawing software to create a fill pattern of tiny Jerseys. He added one more bit of data: Hudson County’s population is about the same as Alaska’s. Now, he had a map.

John Bognar, geographic information systems coordinator in the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at Rutgers, calls Siegel "a man of integrity and high standards,’’ with a "contagious’’ enthusiasm for his craft.

"If I were anywhere in the world,’’ Bognar adds, "I’d want to have one of Mike’s maps because it will be accurate, reliable and creative in how it can tell a story. In this digital age of computer-generated maps, Mike’s work shows that the design and understanding behind the map is as important as the technology.’’

Everything on a map is calculated, even the choice of colors. For his map of Cold War missile sites in "Mapping New Jersey," Siegel used a bleached-out gray for the state map to convey "the institutional Cold War grayness, the paranoia" of the times.

Another map in the book shows birth, death, marriage and divorce rates in New Jersey from 1879 to 2004 on a graph that resembles a heart-rate monitor.

"That can’t be programmed into a computer; that takes thoughtfulness," Siegel explains. "This is what the cartographer brings to the process.

"There will always be cartographers," he adds, "unless there’s some super artificial intelligence acting upon a direction or suggestion or request. The cartographer is not going to be replaced by options on a computer."

Nor can a cartographer’s sense of humor be replaced by any software program. Asked how he describes his job to people he meets, Siegel smiles mischievously.